The EF-3 tornado decimated a neighborhood Wednesday in Mullica Hill.
By Payton Guion | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
The ominous black cloud was getting closer.
Mark Kobylinksi was rapt, standing on his back deck Wednesday with his camera pointed at the sky.
The tornado roiled in the near distance, spinning behind a thin stand of trees as a patio umbrella whipped in the roaring winds.
“Sounds like a freight train,” Kobylinski said for the camera just after he stepped inside his Gloucester County home.
The twister hit about a minute later.
He rushed into the basement with his dog, taking one last peek just as his windows began to explode. For the next 25 seconds, the destructive storm was no longer merely outside the house. The lights went out as the winds knocked out the power and pitched debris throughout the first floor.
Kobylinski emerged just in time to see the tornado barreling away as he looked through a shattered window near his front door. The EF-3 twister, spawned by the remnants of Hurricane Ida, brought winds of up to 150 mph, the National Weather Service later said. New Jersey had not seen such an intense tornado in decades, according to experts.
The damage was significant. But even more remarkable is this harrowing scene played out not in Kansas, Mississippi, or elsewhere in Tornado Alley, but in Mullica Hill.
Experts can explain why that tornado and at least six others touched down in New Jersey and Pennsylvania during the storm. What they don’t know is whether twisters will become more common in the Garden State due to climate change after a marked increase in them this year.
But some are asking the question.
That said, a warming planet — the effects of which the state saw clearly this week — is unlikely to lead to the expansion of Tornado Alley to include New Jersey, despite the intensity of the Gloucester County twister, experts say.
“At this point, we don’t have enough evidence to say that we are even sure that there will be more or stronger tornadoes in New Jersey, let alone that tornadoes would become as common as they would be in the South or Midwest,” Tony Broccoli, a Rutgers University atmospheric scientist, told NJ Advance Media.
But Broccoli added that the relationship between climate change and tornadoes is “unsettled science.”
